


Lullaby

by star_ship



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drabble, Driving, M/M, Monologue, skinny love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 09:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/860530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/star_ship/pseuds/star_ship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cas night-drive with the radio. (Sappy feel-good drabble, 3rd person Dean POV.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely placed in The Right Thing verse. I put it up on Tumblr, originally, and the folks over there seemed to like it, so I figured I would post it here, as well.

It was late, the implacable middle of darkness kind of late that Dean had been driving through his whole life. It was the glare of sun off the windshield that threw him, but the headlights tunneling through 4AM was familiar and safe. He had the windows cracked, the day had been damp and hot in the most oppressive of ways, but they had driven north under a cold front and the air felt chilled and soft now, the deep woods around them quiet. The airwaves were hushed, too. Static and preachers. He found one station that didn’t make him grind his teeth and left it low low low, because Cas was still asleep beside him.

Sam said he would ride up with Garth in the morning after they had burned the bones and Cas and Dean had gone ahead to another case up near Knoxville. It was strange having him sleep, his quiet breath through parted lips and his face more relaxed than Dean had ever seen it awake. Just a man, flesh and blood and vulnerable. It had scared him at first, he’d felt like he had to coddle and protect him, and looking back he felt like an ass for that, because Cas wasn’t useless. He could hold his own. On the second hunt after he had fallen back to earth Graceless and lost, Dean had watched Castiel take down a shifter as if he had been hunting all his life. It was easy for Dean to forget that he had been a soldier, and the bright light inside him that could scorch a demon out of its vessel had not been his only weapon.

And look at him now, dirty and in need of a shave and dead tired asleep with his head against the window, the air coming in and running through his hair, which Dean needed to cut for him again. It was so bizarre, even six months in, and yet somehow it felt more natural than anything. Castiel, a hunter, human, and a good one, too, if Dean had to admit it. It was like he belonged with them. Maybe a subconscious class difference had set a barrier in Dean’s head before, when there were wings on Cas’ back that he couldn’t see but he **knew** were there, but now it was set in stone. Cas was a Winchester if anybody asked, Dean had even put it on his fake ID as an act of solidarity—he’d asked Sam first, but Sam felt the same, that Castiel was as much their brother as they were to each other—and he’d earned that name. It came with curses, Dean had told him that, but Castiel had just given him an elusive smile like he knew maybe better than Dean did before he tucked the ID in his wallet without any further discussion.

Dean’s mind went quiet as he put his eyes back on the road. They’d be hitting the mountains, proper, soon, and it was still another few hours until they would reach their destination. Somewhere past a foothills valley cloaked in kudzu, the radio wormed its way into his brain and worked back out of his mouth, an old song he remembered his mom singing when John was away.

_I hear you singin’ in the wire_  
_I can hear you through the whine_

He thought--without realizing he was thinking of it--of the first time he had heard Castiel’s voice. The true memory sat in the back of his mind blanketed in pain, in white light and Hell and a whisper to tell him he was safe now, but it was murky and lost and in a room he didn’t like to open. The other time still made his teeth vibrate, the keening high wave of power, the memory he still got chills over when he realized that was the thing that was bottled up in the man he called his friend. The first time he had heard Castiel speak his name in a human voice, the gruff rumble, the soldier cadence in his speech throwing him off. And then another first time, without the thunderstorm packaged in a matchbox, just a tired, hurt stranger with eyes he’d been looking into his whole life, stumbling across the field, calling his name in a ragged tone like ‘Dean’ was a spell word that might keep him safe and save him. The fear had been sucked out of it and the old gruff was all but gone, but he liked that last voice the best, the voice he’d be listening to forever, now. Every now and again, somewhere behind his smartass remarks in a tone higher than he’d become accustomed to, though, he could still hear windows breaking, still felt saved.

_And I need you more than want you_  
_And I want you for all time_  
_And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line_

He didn’t realize until he felt a warmth next to him that Cas was awake and had shifted close beside him. He tried not to start, canting his eyes over to Cas, brows up in question. He reached and turned the quiet radio down even more. “You all right? You have another nightmare?”

Castiel shook his head, the focus of his lapis eyes making Dean shift in his seat uncomfortably. “You were singing.”

“Oh…” He squeezed the steering wheel and then let his hands relax. “Sorry.”

“No, no… I liked it.” He reached and turned the radio back up, louder than it had been before. His hand brushed Dean’s knee and he didn’t think about _that_ stuff, the things that had become so much harder to keep out from between them for the last six months, and he was torn between gratitude and disappointment when Cas moved back to his side of the seat, leaning against the window again. “Sing me back to sleep?”

Dean smiled. When it was just the two of them, he let himself humor Cas, in all his unsocialized strangeness. If Sam had been around, he’d have told Cas guys don’t sing fuckin’ lullabies to each other and there was a flask in the backseat if he wanted to go back to sleep so bad, but Sam wasn’t there. It was just them and the engine humming and the cool night as the mountains loomed black-on-black in the distance.

He watched Cas close his eyes, that relaxed perfect angel face on a human man, and Kansas was singing about dust in the wind. Dean wet his lips and relaxed back into the leather seat and he and the radio sang Castiel to sleep.


End file.
